Artificial intelligence is losing hype • Hacker News Board

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#811

Post by Breza » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 4:28 PM UTC

ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #52

I've trained as a neuroscientist and written a book about consciousness. I've worked in machine learning and built products for over 20 years and now use AI a fair bit in the ed-tech work we do. So I've seen how the field has progressed and also have been able to look at it from a perspective most AI/engineering people don't -- what does this artificial intelligence look like when compared to biological intelligence.…

> Just like with powered-flight we don't need bioliogical intelligence to transform the world.

Powered flight offers a cautionary tale for AI. The first confirmed powered flight was in 1903. For the next 60 years, someone broke the airspeed record almost every year. The current record was set in 1976. Nobody has broken that record for 48 years. There are concerns that the state of AI will show a similar pattern, with rapid improvements followed by a plateau.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#812

Post by elephantears » Thu, Aug 29, 2024, 3:53 AM UTC

_acco wrote: post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

Here's the test for experienced engineers to see if the LLM hype is bullshit or not -- use cursor with Claude Sonnet. Build an app in a programming language you don't know at all. Don't stop prompting until you build it.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#813

Post by elephantears » Thu, Aug 29, 2024, 3:55 AM UTC

_acco wrote: post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

Here's a test for experienced engineers to see if the LLM hype is bs or not --

1. Use cursor with Claude Sonnet

2. Pick a programming language you don't know at all

3. Build an app in that language prompting only, don't stop prompting until you've run it successfully

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#814

Post by sod » Thu, Aug 29, 2024, 12:28 PM UTC

Calavar wrote: post #359

_acco wrote: post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

Right now AI is like a chissel. It's a very useful tool, but not useful for everything. Banging your head against the wall of capabilities will give you an intuition when you will pull this tool. Just like you learned how to use a search engine effectively over the last 20 years.

When you are familiar with LLMs, then a question from someone who doesn't use AI is very obvious. It's the same feeling you have when you roll your eyes and say "you could have googled that in 10 seconds".

It's either explaining code where you don't even know the lingo for or what the question could be. Or touching code with a framework you never used. Or tedious tasks like convert parts of text into code or json. Or sometimes your mind is stuck or drifts off. Ask AI for an idea to get the ball rolling again.

Yes, discovering what works and what doesn't is tedious and slower then "just doing it yourself". Like switching IDEs. But if you found a handful of usecases that solve your problems, it is very refreshing.